In my home state of New South Wales, it is illegal to be carrying a knife without a reasonable excuse such as 'the lawful pursuit of the person's occupation'
I fail to understand how a society can function without pocketknives. I'll be sure to use paper shipping tape on the next thing I send to Australia.
It's interesting to see what cost technology people put on freedom:
Death of a multi-billion dollar media distribution industry == OK.
I have to add a few lines to my blocklist == More power to The Man!
I am not saying what Comcast is doing is wrong in this case, if they are doing what they say they are. I just find it interesting how and when we stop looking at issues critically because of how they line up with our prejudices.
"So, why exactly was it that NASA wanted to scrap the Hubble?"
Because the response to the Columbia tragedy has been fear and organizational tunnel vision. NASA is now reluctant to launch the shuttle into any orbital inclination in which there is not a manned craft to serve as an emergency lifeboat (read - ISS).
I call this tunnel vision because NASA's safety efforts are now focused on averting a disaster that results in a safe launch but a predictable reentry failure. This is a rather narrow range of potential problems, and definately not worth the HST in terms of how expensive it is to pursue this safety strategy.
Ok, you really don't know what isotopes are. That's okay. Not knowing the facts is quite different than trying to deliberately ignore them because they don't support your argument. I therefore retract the accusatory tone of my last comment.
An isotope is not "a radioactive atom". An isotope of any given atom X is an atom containing just as many protons and electrons as X, but with more neutrons. For example, deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. It, like very many isotopes, is not radiactive, and its chemical behavior is identical to normal hydrogen. That means that if you look at a toxin like cadmium or iodine, for example, any isotopes of those elements would have exactly the same (chemical) toxicity as the elements themselves. Lifeforms dealing with those toxins, therefore, are not particularly unprepared (chemically) for their isotopes.
Now, that leaves two arguments which would not be in dispute. The first is the radiation effects of radioactive isotopes, which is inarguably catastrophic. The second is that the quantities of toxic chemicals in the Chernobyl area is probably higher than would occur naturally.
...radioactive isotops made in a nuclear plant are poisonous, since because they don't excist naturally in nature, organisms have not evolved protections against them.
You don't really understand what an isotope is, do you? This is the problem with all environmental doomsaying. While I characterize Chernobyl as no less a tragedy than would the greenest eco-activist, this abandonment of scientific fact makes your argument look like ludditism at best and propaganda at worst. It puts me in exactly the same frame of mind as this sort of statement would:
"Stop using CFCs; don't you care about global warming!?"
Yeah, no doubt, man. A hot chick on a motorcycle cruising through radioactive ruins pursued by marauders has 80's postapocolyptic action flick written all over it.
By the way, I disclaim any responsibility for marauder activity in that area. As the name suggests, there is only one of me, and I am not there. Thank you.
I wonder if one could say SCO has actually violated the license.
Well, the GPL doesn't prevent SCO from charging for Linux code. But it does require SCO to distribute that code under the terms of the GPL. They can charge for providing the code, and for supporting it, but they can't prevent someone from freely copying the source and using it for other things, or distributing it for free. I think a strong case could be made that attempting to bully the rest of human civilization into paying a license fee for Linux, regardless of SCO's involvement in activities outlined in section 1 of the GPL, implies that SCO believes that Linux falls under a license other than the GPL. Since they've directly said that many times, I think the question is somewhat analogous to asking if a the unabomber is guilty of arson.
In fact, now that I think about it, that analogy is perfect.
It was my first electric motor. I was about 9 years old and had extracted my first electric motor from some doomed toy, and figured out how to attach wires manually to the brush leads and a battery and make it run. Unfortunately, as with most things I played around with at that age, I didn't know much about cause and effect.
I believe the motor was originally driven by two 1.5 V AA batteries, and I was using a 9V. (Hey, it's easier to connect!) My plan was to use it as a climbing winch, enabling Snake Eyes (tm) to sneak up on the evil Destro(tm)'s clifftop lair. I tied one end of a 3 foot piece of sewing thread to the motor shaft, and the other to Snake Eyes' left hand. I wedged the motor under a book and connected the battery to winch him to the top!
Little did Snake Eyes know what kind of evil Destro had in store for him. Little also did I know - it happened so fast that I am still fuzzy on some details. At some point, Snake Eyes stopped standing on the ground at the base of my dresser and entered into a state where he was spinning at insane velocities about the motor, attached by a tangled 6 inch piece of thread. I have no memory of a transition between these two states.
The moral of the story - if an evil overlord leaves an electric motor conveniently located for you to winch your way up the cliff face to his mountain fortress, don't use it!
What I don't want to see is an orbital weapons platform deployed under false premises.
Yes, because putting weapons in an orbital platform is so much cheaper and more effective than housing them in silos in Kansas. Who knows what evil could come if Rumsfeld got his hands on a large, unprotected orbital concentration of weapons from which missiles could be launched only in well-described orbits that could be easily intercepted.
Since when did a 30 seconds delay to the start of your car journeys constitute a conviction or punishment for anything?
Since the concept of operation of this device presumes guilt and requires proof of innocence before the car can be operated. This is in direct controversion to the U.S. Constitution.
Do you consider regulations requiring use of seat belts a nuisance too?
A device intended to protect occupants in a crash does not, as a basic concept of its operation, presume guilt and require proof of innocence. Even if such an interlock were tied to the operation of seatbelts, there are cases when seatbelts are needed that do not involve criminal liability.
What about places where lights needs to be turned on during daytime and you have to spend two seconds flicking them on? Or all that time and money spent to ensure your car passes safety regulations?... blah blah blah... How is this any different?
The operation of headlights is not a valid example, unless the car is going to turn them off at random intervals to make sure you know to turn them back on. An annual inspection is not unreasonable search and seizure. Forcing your vehicle to presume guilt at random intervals and require you to blow into a test tube, on the other hand, violates several of the Bill of Rights.
The structure of American capitalism is such that the CEO of an enterprise is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value.
What is the legal basis for this? How far does it go? If a CEO becomes aware that he could rob a bank and thus maximize shareholder value for his company, is he legally obligated to do so? Is a CEO legally permitted to take management action that results in a short-term loss of value in order to attain long-term growth? It seems to me that if the duties of a CEO were indeed so bound up in legalism so as to compel him to take illegal action on behalf of his company, management tasks could be automated by this compelling law and the position could be eliminated.
I'm sure we could slap together some code to automate these decisions. We could even achieve perfect karmic symmetry by outsourcing it to India.
If they hire guards to prevent beggars from accessing the economically developed areas that coders work in, it's not Communism.
Of course, they also don't have the DMCA, Ken Lay, or the idea that only corporations can own things, so they don't have whatever we (U.S.) call Democracy, either.
I was thinking more along the lines of portage, but let's explore apt for Fedora...
Wowee. Four mirrors on this continent. Looks like this whole Fedora apt thing is really taking off.
Nah more like $49.94
Wow. They're giving the zero service box-pusher channel 50 points. The best deal Red Hat would give me direct was $89. Add trolling the CDWs of the world for price quotes to the annual Red Hat ownership ritual.
They said the "desktop was unatainable" wow I never got that memo, do you have a link?
It's nice to see you taking credit for Red Hat's success and I commend you for building my favorite distro.
If you mean me as in The Linux Community, then on all our behalf, you're welcome. In case you've forgotten, Red Hat did not write Linux.
If people like you are responsible for "getting red hat where they are" Then they wouldn't abandon you because you gave them money. But its obvious the product you pushed for at work was a free download and you didn't give red hat a f***ing thing now you are pissed they are giving you something back that has 2 months shorter release cycle. but has the added benifit of:
I gave Red Hat a couple of hundred RHN subscriptions, including all of my personal systems and the rest from among my employer and client base, all for doing what a Gentoo user does every time he installs a system (kludging packages together) and keeping an update server running.
1.) install everywhere and anywhere without problems or restrictions.
Except for the small matter of Fedora being a screaming train wreck.
2.) Have a chance to put your own packages in
3.) Decide the direction of your distro by having 1 on 50 discussions with the developers.
4.) No RHN to sign up for 'yum -y update'
5.) Set up your own local repositories.
A distro with a real package management system makes customization and maintenance a lot less of a problem.
I bought RHPW for $50 and will probably pay for updates the next 3 years ($60).
Actually, it's more like $90. After the discount. For a system whose concept Red Hat said was untenable a few weeks ago (desktop Linux). What will they say next week? Will it sound like "Guess what, you, your employer, and all your customers are fucked. Have a nice day."
The distro I spend 4 hours a day on is Fedora. Debian might be nice but I have used Red Hat for years and like it, so why switch?
There's a group in the Orbiter space flight simulator community who wants to write a working version of the DSKY Apollo flight computer for Orbiter. While not source code per se, there are some who want to write a virtual machine in C++ to run the DSKY binary code.
Then you take things too personally and feel that people owe you somthing they don't
Well, I don't know about this whole "owing" business, but an upgrade path might have been nice.
Yes, Fedora is a distribution for the USERS of RHL, and most of the serious ones that dont think Redhat owed us anything, are actally very happy!
Red Hat Linux (RHL) does not exist anymore. Perhaps you mean $RHEL.00? If so, I'm glad you have a cool toy to play with. At any rate, those of us who evangelized for years against hostile management to get Red Hat where they are don't have time for toys. It's a little difficult not to feel bitter about what Red Hat did when one's boss remembers the conversation about how Linux will free us from the Microsoft licensing roller coaster and allow us to use software without being worried about what might happen if the company providing it suddenly changed course.
At the ones that don't, rumours and gossip often take the place of what little real information you would get at a meeting, and that can do a lot to foment discontent among the workers.
This sounds like a version of the specious "communication solves everything" argument. The problem is that communication has no intrinsic value. The question is, how meaningful is the information being communicated? Consider this tidbit:
There are no plans to reduce staff following the merger.
How would you treat this information if you heard it in your current company? You would panic and flee. Why? Because most of us work for people who treat bullshit like it's an art form and avarice like it's a religious law. If we worked for people who were honorable, effective managers, then certainly more communication would be better, but it's plainly obvious that what's working in that case is not the communication, but rather the confidence.
That's your argument? That it doesn't affect most consumers? The same could be said of a TV that explodes 49.999% of the time. If you HP boys are going to get into the astroturfing game, you're going to have to do better than that.
I think by tomorrow, Mr. Steven Evans' research project on geek anger will be complete. I can't wait for the follow up article. I just love hearing about avalanches of angry e-mail. My two cents:
I read the thoughtless, unsubstantiated, sensationalist rant by Steven Evans wherein he not only blames the Linux community for the MyDoom virus, but proceeds, blisfully ignorant of a logical foundation for his points, to pound a drumbeat of paranoia with regard to motives and activities of the Linux community that have no bearing on the MyDoom virus:
"Meanwhile the court dispute between SCO and Linux users (rather than the cyberspace war between SCO and the hackers) is scheduled for next year in a court in Utah."
Had Mr. Evans bothered to do the most basic fact checking before writing this drivel, he would have become aware that the PRIMARY purpose of the MyDoom virus is to construct a massive spam distribution network. This is noteable because among the groups most ardently opposed to the profligation of spam is the Linux community. Our work on content-based spam filtering is the current state of the art in keeping your mailbox clean, forcing spammers to invent complex means of obscuring their messages and setting off an escalating technological arms race with groups such as the Russian spam mafia.
When evaluating the motive behind a given action, which carries more weight- the stated intent of the act, or evidence as who exactly is putting their money where their mouth is?
Would it be too obvious to follow the money and determine who might have a grudge against the linux community, or does it just make better copy to paint the picture of the rouge punk hacker attacking a corporate website?
An ejection from the ISS's orbit would get you as far from Earth as an ejection of the same energy from lower inclinations. The question is, once you look at the solar orbit you achieve, how much energy got spent on actual orbital change as opposed to inclination change (relative to the ecliptic).
Even the craziest orbit will offer two opportunities per year for a clean ejection, but that is certainly very restrictive for use as a "stepping stone" to anywhere.
From what I understood, the FBI won't even get involved with anything that doesn't represent at least X tens of thousands of dollars of losses/damage.
The FBI can do anything that's covered under the interstate commerce clause, which, as a matter of case law, is anything. Combine that with the popular idea that the Internet is full of smut, add a religious right-wing President, and the question of what they are willing to do has a pretty easy answer.
So perhaps what you mean is, the FBI generally gets involved in really high-profile high-profit computer crime?
No, that's what you mean. You made that point. As regards computer crime against business, you are correct. But that doesn't mean they approach other sorts of crime according to the same criteria.
Slashdot Mirror
In my home state of New South Wales, it is illegal to be carrying a knife without a reasonable excuse such as 'the lawful pursuit of the person's occupation'
I fail to understand how a society can function without pocketknives. I'll be sure to use paper shipping tape on the next thing I send to Australia.
- Death of a multi-billion dollar media distribution industry == OK.
- I have to add a few lines to my blocklist == More power to The Man!
I am not saying what Comcast is doing is wrong in this case, if they are doing what they say they are. I just find it interesting how and when we stop looking at issues critically because of how they line up with our prejudices."So, why exactly was it that NASA wanted to scrap the Hubble?"
Because the response to the Columbia tragedy has been fear and organizational tunnel vision. NASA is now reluctant to launch the shuttle into any orbital inclination in which there is not a manned craft to serve as an emergency lifeboat (read - ISS).
I call this tunnel vision because NASA's safety efforts are now focused on averting a disaster that results in a safe launch but a predictable reentry failure. This is a rather narrow range of potential problems, and definately not worth the HST in terms of how expensive it is to pursue this safety strategy.
Ok, you really don't know what isotopes are. That's okay. Not knowing the facts is quite different than trying to deliberately ignore them because they don't support your argument. I therefore retract the accusatory tone of my last comment.
An isotope is not "a radioactive atom". An isotope of any given atom X is an atom containing just as many protons and electrons as X, but with more neutrons. For example, deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. It, like very many isotopes, is not radiactive, and its chemical behavior is identical to normal hydrogen. That means that if you look at a toxin like cadmium or iodine, for example, any isotopes of those elements would have exactly the same (chemical) toxicity as the elements themselves. Lifeforms dealing with those toxins, therefore, are not particularly unprepared (chemically) for their isotopes.
Now, that leaves two arguments which would not be in dispute. The first is the radiation effects of radioactive isotopes, which is inarguably catastrophic. The second is that the quantities of toxic chemicals in the Chernobyl area is probably higher than would occur naturally.
...radioactive isotops made in a nuclear plant are poisonous, since because they don't excist naturally in nature, organisms have not evolved protections against them.
You don't really understand what an isotope is, do you? This is the problem with all environmental doomsaying. While I characterize Chernobyl as no less a tragedy than would the greenest eco-activist, this abandonment of scientific fact makes your argument look like ludditism at best and propaganda at worst. It puts me in exactly the same frame of mind as this sort of statement would:
"Stop using CFCs; don't you care about global warming!?"
Yes, I misspelled post apocalyptic. Retractions, etc.
Yeah, no doubt, man. A hot chick on a motorcycle cruising through radioactive ruins pursued by marauders has 80's postapocolyptic action flick written all over it.
By the way, I disclaim any responsibility for marauder activity in that area. As the name suggests, there is only one of me, and I am not there. Thank you.
I wonder if one could say SCO has actually violated the license.
Well, the GPL doesn't prevent SCO from charging for Linux code. But it does require SCO to distribute that code under the terms of the GPL. They can charge for providing the code, and for supporting it, but they can't prevent someone from freely copying the source and using it for other things, or distributing it for free. I think a strong case could be made that attempting to bully the rest of human civilization into paying a license fee for Linux, regardless of SCO's involvement in activities outlined in section 1 of the GPL, implies that SCO believes that Linux falls under a license other than the GPL. Since they've directly said that many times, I think the question is somewhat analogous to asking if a the unabomber is guilty of arson.
In fact, now that I think about it, that analogy is perfect.
It was my first electric motor. I was about 9 years old and had extracted my first electric motor from some doomed toy, and figured out how to attach wires manually to the brush leads and a battery and make it run. Unfortunately, as with most things I played around with at that age, I didn't know much about cause and effect.
I believe the motor was originally driven by two 1.5 V AA batteries, and I was using a 9V. (Hey, it's easier to connect!) My plan was to use it as a climbing winch, enabling Snake Eyes (tm) to sneak up on the evil Destro(tm)'s clifftop lair. I tied one end of a 3 foot piece of sewing thread to the motor shaft, and the other to Snake Eyes' left hand. I wedged the motor under a book and connected the battery to winch him to the top!
Little did Snake Eyes know what kind of evil Destro had in store for him. Little also did I know - it happened so fast that I am still fuzzy on some details. At some point, Snake Eyes stopped standing on the ground at the base of my dresser and entered into a state where he was spinning at insane velocities about the motor, attached by a tangled 6 inch piece of thread. I have no memory of a transition between these two states.
The moral of the story - if an evil overlord leaves an electric motor conveniently located for you to winch your way up the cliff face to his mountain fortress, don't use it!
What I don't want to see is an orbital weapons platform deployed under false premises.
Yes, because putting weapons in an orbital platform is so much cheaper and more effective than housing them in silos in Kansas. Who knows what evil could come if Rumsfeld got his hands on a large, unprotected orbital concentration of weapons from which missiles could be launched only in well-described orbits that could be easily intercepted.
"My job is to apply... the formula."
Since when did a 30 seconds delay to the start of your car journeys constitute a conviction or punishment for anything?
... blah blah blah... How is this any different?
Since the concept of operation of this device presumes guilt and requires proof of innocence before the car can be operated. This is in direct controversion to the U.S. Constitution.
Do you consider regulations requiring use of seat belts a nuisance too?
A device intended to protect occupants in a crash does not, as a basic concept of its operation, presume guilt and require proof of innocence. Even if such an interlock were tied to the operation of seatbelts, there are cases when seatbelts are needed that do not involve criminal liability.
What about places where lights needs to be turned on during daytime and you have to spend two seconds flicking them on? Or all that time and money spent to ensure your car passes safety regulations?
The operation of headlights is not a valid example, unless the car is going to turn them off at random intervals to make sure you know to turn them back on. An annual inspection is not unreasonable search and seizure. Forcing your vehicle to presume guilt at random intervals and require you to blow into a test tube, on the other hand, violates several of the Bill of Rights.
The structure of American capitalism is such that the CEO of an enterprise is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value.
What is the legal basis for this? How far does it go? If a CEO becomes aware that he could rob a bank and thus maximize shareholder value for his company, is he legally obligated to do so? Is a CEO legally permitted to take management action that results in a short-term loss of value in order to attain long-term growth? It seems to me that if the duties of a CEO were indeed so bound up in legalism so as to compel him to take illegal action on behalf of his company, management tasks could be automated by this compelling law and the position could be eliminated.
I'm sure we could slap together some code to automate these decisions. We could even achieve perfect karmic symmetry by outsourcing it to India.
Stay back 200 ft. Not responsible for broken windshield.
If they hire guards to prevent beggars from accessing the economically developed areas that coders work in, it's not Communism.
Of course, they also don't have the DMCA, Ken Lay, or the idea that only corporations can own things, so they don't have whatever we (U.S.) call Democracy, either.
apt-get isn't a good package management system?
I was thinking more along the lines of portage, but let's explore apt for Fedora...
Wowee. Four mirrors on this continent. Looks like this whole Fedora apt thing is really taking off.
Nah more like $49.94
Wow. They're giving the zero service box-pusher channel 50 points. The best deal Red Hat would give me direct was $89. Add trolling the CDWs of the world for price quotes to the annual Red Hat ownership ritual.
They said the "desktop was unatainable" wow I never got that memo, do you have a link?
yes.
I gave Red Hat a couple of hundred RHN subscriptions, including all of my personal systems and the rest from among my employer and client base, all for doing what a Gentoo user does every time he installs a system (kludging packages together) and keeping an update server running.
Except for the small matter of Fedora being a screaming train wreck.
A distro with a real package management system makes customization and maintenance a lot less of a problem.
Actually, it's more like $90. After the discount. For a system whose concept Red Hat said was untenable a few weeks ago (desktop Linux). What will they say next week? Will it sound like "Guess what, you, your employer, and all your customers are fucked. Have a nice day."
Because Red Hat Linux doesn't exist anymore?
There's a group in the Orbiter space flight simulator community who wants to write a working version of the DSKY Apollo flight computer for Orbiter. While not source code per se, there are some who want to write a virtual machine in C++ to run the DSKY binary code.
Then you take things too personally and feel that people owe you somthing they don't
Well, I don't know about this whole "owing" business, but an upgrade path might have been nice.
Yes, Fedora is a distribution for the USERS of RHL, and most of the serious ones that dont think Redhat owed us anything, are actally very happy!
Red Hat Linux (RHL) does not exist anymore. Perhaps you mean $RHEL.00? If so, I'm glad you have a cool toy to play with. At any rate, those of us who evangelized for years against hostile management to get Red Hat where they are don't have time for toys. It's a little difficult not to feel bitter about what Red Hat did when one's boss remembers the conversation about how Linux will free us from the Microsoft licensing roller coaster and allow us to use software without being worried about what might happen if the company providing it suddenly changed course.
Wouldn't it just be classic if it turns out that this code was outsourced?
This sounds like a version of the specious "communication solves everything" argument. The problem is that communication has no intrinsic value. The question is, how meaningful is the information being communicated? Consider this tidbit: How would you treat this information if you heard it in your current company? You would panic and flee. Why? Because most of us work for people who treat bullshit like it's an art form and avarice like it's a religious law. If we worked for people who were honorable, effective managers, then certainly more communication would be better, but it's plainly obvious that what's working in that case is not the communication, but rather the confidence.
Hey, it really doesn't affect most consumers.
That's your argument? That it doesn't affect most consumers? The same could be said of a TV that explodes 49.999% of the time. If you HP boys are going to get into the astroturfing game, you're going to have to do better than that.
I think by tomorrow, Mr. Steven Evans' research project on geek anger will be complete. I can't wait for the follow up article. I just love hearing about avalanches of angry e-mail. My two cents: I read the thoughtless, unsubstantiated, sensationalist rant by Steven Evans wherein he not only blames the Linux community for the MyDoom virus, but proceeds, blisfully ignorant of a logical foundation for his points, to pound a drumbeat of paranoia with regard to motives and activities of the Linux community that have no bearing on the MyDoom virus: "Meanwhile the court dispute between SCO and Linux users (rather than the cyberspace war between SCO and the hackers) is scheduled for next year in a court in Utah." Had Mr. Evans bothered to do the most basic fact checking before writing this drivel, he would have become aware that the PRIMARY purpose of the MyDoom virus is to construct a massive spam distribution network. This is noteable because among the groups most ardently opposed to the profligation of spam is the Linux community. Our work on content-based spam filtering is the current state of the art in keeping your mailbox clean, forcing spammers to invent complex means of obscuring their messages and setting off an escalating technological arms race with groups such as the Russian spam mafia. When evaluating the motive behind a given action, which carries more weight- the stated intent of the act, or evidence as who exactly is putting their money where their mouth is? Would it be too obvious to follow the money and determine who might have a grudge against the linux community, or does it just make better copy to paint the picture of the rouge punk hacker attacking a corporate website?
An ejection from the ISS's orbit would get you as far from Earth as an ejection of the same energy from lower inclinations. The question is, once you look at the solar orbit you achieve, how much energy got spent on actual orbital change as opposed to inclination change (relative to the ecliptic).
Even the craziest orbit will offer two opportunities per year for a clean ejection, but that is certainly very restrictive for use as a "stepping stone" to anywhere.
From what I understood, the FBI won't even get involved with anything that doesn't represent at least X tens of thousands of dollars of losses/damage.
The FBI can do anything that's covered under the interstate commerce clause, which, as a matter of case law, is anything. Combine that with the popular idea that the Internet is full of smut, add a religious right-wing President, and the question of what they are willing to do has a pretty easy answer.
So perhaps what you mean is, the FBI generally gets involved in really high-profile high-profit computer crime?
No, that's what you mean. You made that point. As regards computer crime against business, you are correct. But that doesn't mean they approach other sorts of crime according to the same criteria.